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Outside Magazine February 2002
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Winter to the Corps (Cont.)

"You can't simulate fear"; Firing through smoke grenades during a live-fire drill at Fort Greely.
THE MARINE CORPS Mountain Warfare Training Center was founded in 1951 in response to the losses suffered by ill-prepared U.S. forces in the Korean War, where more than 3,000 soldiers sustained severe frostbite during the Chosin Reservoir campaign alone. Over the last half-century the MWTC, headquartered near Bridgeport, California, has trained nearly half a million members of the Corps, other branches of the U.S. military, and armed forces from other nations. Every year approximately 10,000 marines undergo training at the MWTC. By comparison, the Army Northern Warfare Training Center in Fort Wainwright, Alaska, sees fewer than 500 servicemen annually, and the Army National Guard Mountain Warfare School, in Jericho, Vermont, trains several hundred soldiers, National Guardsmen, and reservists each year. The Army's 10th Mountain Division, despite its name and history, has not trained units in mountaineering, avalanche work, or cold-weather survival since World War II.

When the U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan was launched in October, the relevance of mountain warfare was thrown into sharp relief. The withdrawal of the Soviet military in Afghanistan in the 1980s was attributed not only to the ferocity of Afghan guerrilla fighters, but to the region's vast, rugged, and remote mountain landscape. Despite the anti-terrorism coalition's overwhelming air superiority and the panoply of new technology available to American forces, the prospect of U.S. soldiers helping to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies in harsh winter conditions across some of the most difficult terrain on earth suddenly became very real.

In the past, it was widely assumed that civilian mountain guides, rock climbers, and avalanche specialists were far more advanced in technique and equipment than their military counterparts. "Military climbing" has sometimes been used as a term of ridicule. Today, however, a strong liaison exists between adventure athletes and soldiers. In recent months, for example, Exum Mountain Guides in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has been training military personnel on their way to the front lines in Afghanistan.

Among the members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units deployed near Kandahar in late November were a number of "mountain leaders" and assault climbers who have received advanced training at the MWTC; hundreds of other marines who were sent to Afghanistan have also been trained at the center. But according to Major General Thomas Jones, the Quantico, Virginia-based commander of training and education for the Marine Corps, the mission of the MWTC goes beyond preparing units to fight in places like Central Asia.

"Training in a cold, mountainous environment is the closest thing we have to approximating the stress a soldier undergoes in combat," Jones told me. "If a marine can learn how to fight in the cold in the mountains, he can fight anywhere—desert, jungle, anywhere. Severe cold and rugged terrain force soldiers to work together, to share and eventually overcome incredible adversity. It builds cohesiveness.

"You can't simulate humping a 70-pound pack up to 11,000 feet," he continued. "You can't simulate climbing or skiing. You can't simulate cold. You can't simulate fear. You have to experience these things—experience them and learn from them. That's how to make a soldier. Even if we never fought another day in the cold or the mountains, we would still train there, because it teaches marines how to handle extreme conditions. That's the real power of the Mountain Warfare Training Center, and the brass know it."

I arranged to visit the MWTC in California and then accompany about 60 marines on winter maneuvers at a training site south of Fairbanks, Alaska. In addition to the ten battalions that receive summer and winter mountain-warfare training at the MWTC each year, some 300 marines come annually in hopes of either becoming MWTC instructors or mountain leaders for their own battalions. One purpose of the trip to Alaska is to evaluate the program's would-be leaders. Nearly a third of these hopefuls don't succeed.

"It's the most physically intense program in the military," Captain Andretta told me when I first spoke with him by phone. "It's an elite posting. You have to want to come, and you have to pull strings to make it happen. Those marines who survive to become instructors are the cream of the crop: the strongest, the toughest, the smartest in the Corps."




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